BHB is red-carded

The under-fire managing director (commercial) Nigel Smith yesterdayday defended the British Horseracing Board's proposal that charges paid by newspapers for racecard data should be drastically increased.

A British national newspaper yesterday asked the question is Smith the most dangerous man in racing? While another accused the BHB of throwing the sport into turmoil.

National and regional daily papers currently pay around £3,400 each year for the information, which earns an estimated £300,000 for the BHB. However, the new circulation-based charge is expected to generate over £2 million and could result in an annual bill of around £230,000 for a paper like the Daily Mail, based on .03p per copy of circulation for a year.

The Sun currently pays £3,500 a year but under the new charges proposed by the BHB that figure would shoot up to £340,000. The new suggestions could also mean that newspapers that sell up to 20 million copies a year, which includes most regional dailies, would pay a fixed fee of £5,000.

Explaining the proposed hike in charges Smith said yesterday: "The situation is that we have previously charged a nominal fee and we think that should be on a more commercial basis but in most cases it actually amounts to a few hundred per day, which given the value of the content we think is a fair price. What we didn't say was this was a policy we didn't want to impose. We said that we wanted to have a dialogue with them - that was the view we'd come to in terms of a fair view."

Some newspapers omitted one or even two of yesterday's three racecards from their editions.